Competency Centres: finalizing their implementation
by Jose Herrera
August 1st, 2014
For the final installment of this blog series on Competency Centres, we would like to finalize by talking about the different challenges that a governance body would address, and the long term benefits that it will bring to the organization. As a preface to this blog, please refer to the first blog, and to the second blog.
The Challenges of Governance
The following are some of the challenges that Governance, in the form of a Competency Centre; helps solve:
• The most challenging part of every organization: People. With people, politics materialize. Corporate politics is always the elephant in the room. Governance protects people from themselves. In heavily bureaucratic organizations, where resistance to change is substantial; proper Governance can help, since it will handle progressive change and implementation of new processes and systems.
• It is human nature to first implement technologies, and then implement the rules (i.e. Governance). We first invented cars… and then the traffic laws, right? Establishing Governance early helps establish the necessary policies, principles and guidelines that the organization will follow.
• Proper communication between business units is crucial for the successful establishment of Governance; otherwise, noncompliance will propagate across the organization.
• Proper Governance will also address any challenges that today’s multi-cultural and multi-vision organizational environments bring, and avoid the classic: “I will put this code I just created in production by myself, that’s how we do it where I come from… and, there is no better test than production.”.
• Nowadays, many leaders and managers within large organizations try to evade confrontation for many different reasons; all of them creating bureaucracy and overkill: hopes of organizational advancement, corporate politics avoidance, etc. However, this lack of decision making can be handled by a Governance Body with established mechanisms and processes within the organization, and not having to rely on a single individual. Additionally, proper Governance will not let certain groups get their own way; bringing consistency across the organization and reducing enterprise debt.
Benefits of a Competency Center
The establishment of a Competency Center does:
• Enable and maintain communications across different teams and stakeholders.
* Provide Governance for new and existing integration projects.
* Keep a consistent record of the existing integrations across the organization.
• Provide expertise around system integration, assisting in the elaboration of technical recommendations, and issuing decision records when compliance does not take place.
• Provide guidance with Development Guidelines, standards and best practices, along with enforcing adherence to an established Reference Architecture and its derived Design Patterns.
• Provide guidance around integration-specific Methodologies, and contains all necessary templates for proper execution of integration projects.
• Deliver an escalation mechanism through the Governance Committee.
Our Approach
Groundswell’s Competency Center methodology allows our clients to establish the proper Governance mechanisms, in order to properly implement and sustain modern integration technologies; while allowing people to leverage technology in order to perform their processes, bringing revenue to the organization. Groundswell works with clients in order to properly customize a Competency Center, aimed at Integration, Business Intelligence, Business Process Management or Enterprise Content Management; that will allow them build an effective and progressive organization.
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